Cormier claimed to take into account the ages, temperaments, mobility and skills of players when matching up single players or pairs of friends but admitted he was not always able to. Members who seldom purchased equipment in his shop or tipped him less than fifty dollars at Christmas often found their partners uncongenial, causing hard feelings. Cormier scheduled tee-times electric carts required; no strolling allowed every quarter-hour between 6:30 A.M. and 3:30 P.M. A sign in the office above the sign-up book stated that Grey Hills policy was to enable 288 players, about three-quarters of the membership, to play eighteen holes during prime time at least once each weekend if they wished, allowing 4.5 hours clasped time on the course for each full round.
Members of all ages denounced this practice as scandalously rushed.
"Might as well play public links and save the goddamn money; going to be this crowded here," Rob Lewis said more than once.
Toward the end of Gerald Ford's term as president, a number of quieter members, original founders and their close friends approaching their eightieth birthdays, mostly retired, became morose as they learned one by one that age inexorably imparts greater inaccuracy and inconsistency to all aspects of most players' games. They began to play undistinguished golf. This not only made them unhappy but also prompted gloating, needling remarks by insensitive younger, newer members who observed their elders' difficulties when Bolo teamed them in foursomes. The older members found this taunting petty, but tried to pretend to be amused. Off by themselves they sulked and brooded, seething that the club had ever found it financially necessary eight or ten years before to admit the upstarts into what they still thought of as their club, forgetting they had angrily rejected the only alternative: to assess each of them a heavy dues surcharge to pay for needed improvements and repairs. At meetings of the executive committee they retaliated with barbed remarks of their own, disparaging the club's increasing emphasis on golf and allocation of resources to it as unwise neglect of its other recreational resources, such as fishing, that members of all ages could enjoy.
To rebut the younger crowd's assertion that so few members fished, they declared that they fished nearly every day each spring, when the more recent members, still with jobs to tend, were unable to use the club, and therefore were not around to see them. They said resentfully that they quit fishing in May only because forced to by the golfing traffic.
All of this was true. The fishermen Rob Lewis and Heck Sanderson among them would show up in cold grey April when the course was in poor shape, their faces and conversations severe. At that time of year they scoffed openly at golf, as inferior to fishing as a test, exercise and demonstration of intelligence, dexterity and skill. They said they stooped to golf themselves only because the other golfers made the nobler sport imprudent, lamenting their enforced neglect of a fine natural resource.
The considerable number and reasonable size of the fish that Lewis and Sanderson and the others caught from the two watercourses annually caused a small stir among Grey Hills golfing purists who saw them on cold weekends when they used the club for lunch and drinks and wistful conversation about great golf days soon to come. Finding the fishing outfits and the behavior of the people in them laughable, they had assumed that people who looked funny could not possibly catch fish. But the anglers had a point when they lamented the summer inaccessibility of the streams. They had plenty of fish, and members caught a good many.
There were some mature brown trout in the river, the largest of them one or two three-pounders were caught each year and immediately declared lunkers fattened by ten-inch rainbows stocked by the State Department of Fisheries and Wildlife each spring. The department estimated the cost of each hatchery trout at $1.50. Many of them perished soon after arrival, before fishing season opened, those that eluded the big wild browns caught and eaten by hawks, fishers and otters that had learned to gather in the shadow of Mount Wolf upstream of the club as soon as the state truck went back out to the paved road.
The successful anglers were proud in the clubhouse when they returned with their creels and found someone who would incautiously ask to see their catches. They regularly had several good-sized trout to show.
After the kitchen staff had cleaned and grilled the fish, the fishing members would eat them in the dining room with much boastfulness about their flavor and many foamy dark-beer toasts to each other's prowess.
They owed their fish to Hilliard. In 1975 when he was still a power broker in the House, one quiet afternoon in March he had idly fallen into reflecting about the previous Sunday afternoon and evening he had spent at Grey Hills, first at a quarrelsome meeting of the membership committee and then over dinner with Merrion. The night before he and Mercy had gone to a dinner party at Walter and Diane Fox's home on Pynchon Hill in Canterbury. Even though Merrion was also almost always there, at Walter's invitation, it was one of Mercy's favorite ways to spend an evening out.
"I don't know whether you noticed it," Hilliard said to Merrion, cutting his cold roast beef, 'but when you suggested last night to Walter that he should join here, he just about laughed in your face. I don't think it was because he doesn't like you, or thought you were making fun of him. I think when you said you'd propose him and I'd second, he didn't believe you think anyone we sponsored would get in."
"I guess I didn't get it," Merrion said, eating lobster salad. "I thought he just wasn't interested. Too rich for his blood, I assumed.
Walter's fairly cheap, you know. "Throws nickels around like manhole covers," as Dad used to say."
"That wasn't what he said," Hilliard said. "What he did was laugh and shake his head and say: "I dunno, Amby. I don't think those folks're used to you yet, never mind bringing in your friends." He especially mentioned Warren Corey's name, and Rob Lewis's. I think what he meant is that someone's said something makes him think we may be members, but we don't belong yet, and maybe never will. We didn't get in on our charm. Everyone knows we bought our way in the club was desperate for money; we happened to have some, or you did; they held their noses and let us in. But they still resent the fact that they had to do it, and have to live with us now. That was what Walter was saying to you. In doesn't mean we've been accepted."
Merrion shrugged. "Fuck 'em," he said, spearing claw meat, "I like it here. I think it's a very nice place. Excellent golf course, very well run; I don't have to wait to tee off. Decent food and they serve a big drink. Expensive but I got the money; so, what? Me being here bothers someone else, that's their problem."
"Yeah," Hilliard said, 'but I was very conscious of it today at the meeting. What people said, how they acted, whenever a name would come up: I watched them to see how they'd react. I decided I think Walter's got something there. These bastards may like our money all right, but they're not very keen about us."
"Ummm," Merrion said, nodding and chewing. When he'd swallowed he said: "You prolly oughta stop goin' to dinner at the Foxes' house, is what I think. They're a bad influence on you. First you think Diane's trynah break up your marriage, giving Mercy dangerous notions, and now you're tellin' me what Walter said got you so edgy you're lookin' for insults today. You're becomin' a little hoopy, looking for conspiracies. You and fuckin' Jim Garrison. Next thing I know, I'll be in the audience, you're the speaker; I'm prolly dozin', waiting for the finish when I jump up from my chair, kick off the standing ovation and all of a sudden I'll be hearing you tell the people it was Nixon who killed Kennedy.
"And anyway, if they are bigoted, whaddaya gonna do about it call in the IRA to blow up the swimming pool?"